Method and Metaphysics in Plato's Sophist and Statesman

First published Thu Oct 6, 2005; substantive revision Mon Mar 2, 2015

The Sophist and Statesman are late Platonic
dialogues, whose relative dates are established by their stylistic
similarity to the Laws, a work that was apparently still
“on the wax” at the time of Plato's death (Diogenes
Laertius 3.37). These dialogues are important in exhibiting Plato's
views on method and metaphysics after he criticized his own most
famous contribution to the history of philosophy, the theory of
separate, immaterial forms in the Parmenides. The
Statesman also offers a transitional statement of Plato's
political philosophy between the Republic and the
Laws. The Sophist and Statesman show the
author's increasing interest in mundane and practical knowledge. In
this respect they seem more down-to-earth and Aristotelian in tone
than dialogues dated to Plato's middle period such as the
Phaedo and the Republic. This entry will focus on
method and metaphysics.

The Sophist and Statesman represent themselves as
the first two members of a trilogy, which was to include a third
member, the Philosopher, a dialogue Plato never wrote. The
conversations in the Sophist and Statesman take
place sequentially on a single day and are dramatically linked to the
Theaetetus, which occurred on the previous day, shortly
before Socrates' trial and death (Theaetetus 210d,
Sophist 216a). The Theaetetus and Sophist
are also linked more remotely to the Parmenides, a
conversation Socrates says he had with the great philosopher of Elea,
when Parmenides was old and he was very young (Theaetetus
183e–184a, Sophist 217c). Socrates plays a minor role
in the conversations in the Sophist and Statesman,
observing the proceedings but replaced as main speaker by a visitor
from Elea, a follower of Parmenides, who converses with Theaetetus in
the Sophist and with a young man named Socrates (the Younger)
in the Statesman.

Although the Sophist and Statesman are dialogues,
the interaction between the Stranger and his two young interlocutors
seems rather different from that between Socrates and his interlocutors
in the Socratic dialogues, including the Theaetetus. In that
dialogue Theaetetus distinguished himself as a highly promising
student, who answered Socrates' questions resourcefully. The
respondents in the Sophist and Statesman are
docile by comparison, readily accepting the Stranger's arguments and
occasionally asking him to explain, but rarely raising tough
objections or making good proposals of their own. Young Socrates in
the Statesman is particularly prone to misunderstandings and
mistakes. Of all the respondents in Plato's dialogues, the
interlocutors in the Sophist and Statesman most
closely resemble the respondent in the second part of the
Parmenides, a young man named Aristotle (not the famous
philosopher), who never objects when he should, and who gives his
most enthusiastic assents when Parmenides' argument is most
problematic or obscure.

These dramatic features raise questions of philosophical importance.
Why does Plato connect the Sophist and Statesman
with the Theaetetus and Parmenides, dialogues
written in all probability a good deal earlier? Why do the speakers
keep anticipating a third dialogue, the Philosopher
(Sophist 216c–217b, 253c–254b;
Statesman 257a–c, 258b), on a topic plainly dear to
Plato's heart, which he then never wrote? Why does Plato replace
Socrates with the colorless visitor from Elea? Elsewhere Plato allows
speakers to give long speeches (e.g., Timaeus' cosmogony
in the Timaeus), so why does the visitor engage in question
and answer, given that he does most of the talking and his respondents seem
unprepossessing and are chosen precisely because they are young and
so likely to cause least trouble (cf. Sophist 217d with
Parmenides 137b)?

The Sophist and Statesman strike many scholars as
more dogmatic than other Platonic dialogues. The Stranger sets out to
define the sophist, the statesman, and the philosopher, claiming that
they are three distinct kinds (Sophist 217a–b); the two
existing dialogues appear to give successful definitions of their
target kinds and to present and defend significant methodological and
metaphysical positions. The Sophist arguably solves the
problem of false statement, one of a family of problems that had
dogged other Platonic dialogues, including the Theaetetus.

Perhaps Plato replaces Socrates with the visitor from Elea because
Elea was the hometown of Parmenides, and in the Sophist Plato
plans to criticize Parmenides' dictum that we cannot speak or think of
what-is-not (Sophist 237a). Perhaps, too, readers are meant
to recall the Parmenides, a dialogue staged some fifty years
earlier, in which Parmenides himself led the conversation. After
criticizing Plato's middle period treatment of forms (inadequately
defended by a youthful Socrates), Parmenides announced that before
positing forms Socrates should undertake rigorous philosophical
training. In the second part of the dialogue, Parmenides then
demonstrated with a youthful respondent the sort of exercise he had in
mind, focusing on another thesis for which he was famous, that there
is only one thing (Parmenides 128a–b, 137b). By using a
visitor from Elea, Plato invites his audience to recall Parmenides'
own positions and performance in that earlier dialogue. (For
discussion of the dialogue form in these late works, cf. Frede 1996,
Rowe 1996, and C. Gill 1996).

The Sophist and Statesman each undertake a
particular task, the first to define a sophist, the second to define a
statesman. But they have a larger purpose. The Statesman
gives many indications that the investigation of the statesman is
being undertaken not primarily for its own sake but for the sake of a
greater project—our becoming better dialecticians
(Statesman 285d, 286d–287a).

The Stranger makes this announcement, first reminding Young Socrates
of a previous discussion about children learning their letters:

Suppose someone should ask us about the children sitting together
learning their letters: when one of them is asked of what letters some
word or other is composed, do we ever say that the inquiry is more for
the sake of the one problem set before him or for the sake of his
becoming a better speller in all such cases?—Clearly for the
sake of his becoming a better speller in all such cases.—Now
again what about our inquiry about the statesman? Is it posed more for
the sake of that thing itself [the statesman] or for the sake of our
becoming more dialectical about everything?—This too is clear,
that it's for the sake of our becoming more dialectical about
everything. (Statesman 285c–d)

Next the Stranger talks about examples, such as weaving, for which
there are perceptible likenesses, easy to understand, which an
instructor can point to when an inquirer has trouble grasping a verbal
account. But there are other things, described as greatest and most
valuable, that cannot be observed or imaged. It is for the sake of
those harder topics that the inquirers practice giving and receiving
an account on simple examples, such as weaving, where they can fall
back on perceptible instances. The Stranger says:

Hence it is necessary to practice being able to give and receive a verbal
account of each thing. For immaterial things, being finest and
greatest, are shown clearly by a verbal account alone and by nothing else,
and all the things said now are for the sake of those. But in
everything practice is easier in lesser things, rather than in greater
things. (Statesman 286a–b)

We first practice giving and receiving a verbal account on easy
examples like weaving, which can also be observed and imaged. Then we
practice on difficult examples, such as the statesman. Here we must
give and receive a verbal account without relying on visual aids. But
the statesman is still part of the exercise. Our inquiry about him is
itself undertaken to make us better dialecticians, able to deal with
all such topics. If we can succeed with the statesman, we will have
learned a technique, or how to find a technique, that can be applied
to other difficult cases, such as the philosopher.

The Statesman chiefly aims to demonstrate how to undertake
all such inquiries. Its own inquiry stimulates the participants (and
us readers) to recognize what mistakes to avoid and what paths are
worth pursuing and why. But significantly, as one sees from comparing
the treatments of the sophist and statesman, different kinds of
subject matter demand different sorts of methods. So we cannot simply
extend the methods of the Sophist and Statesman in
a mechanical way to the investigation of the philosopher and other
great and difficult topics. These dialogues teach us how to go about
philosophical investigations. They do not offer a formula that can be
simply applied to further cases.

If the Sophist and Statesman are philosophical
exercises, there may be a good reason why the final dialogue of the
trilogy, the Philosopher, is missing. Plato would spoil the
lesson if he wrote it for us (cf. Dorter 1994, 236). If we have
learned how to investigate philosophical problems in the
Sophist and Statesman, Plato may be challenging his
audience to search for the philosopher themselves, using the
techniques and recommendations these dialogues provide (M. L. Gill, 2012).

The Sophist and Statesman search for definitions,
and both dialogues focus on the search. The Sophist speaks
often of the hunt in which we are engaged and of the sophist as our
quarry. In this hunt the sophist time and again eludes us, taking
cover in the darkness of not-being, reappearing occasionally to
dispute the very existence of the kind to which we wish to assign
him. How can we define the sophist at all, if we cannot get hold of
him or coherently characterize the kind to which he belongs? The
Statesman repeatedly notices the road traveled—longer
roads and shorter roads that will take us to our destination or lead
us astray. The dialogue often reflects on better and worse methods of
seeking the goal. The Sophist and the first part of the
Statesman represent the search by means of an elaborate
tree-like system of roads. The inquirers travel down these branching
roads; at each fork they must choose which branch to take in the hope
of finding their quarry, and that quarry alone, at the terminus. This
method of discovery is called division, and in its most
usual form it is the repeated dichotomy of a general kind into two
subordinate kinds. Inquirers use
division to locate a target kind at the terminus of one branch of the
division. A definition, when reached by this means, recounts the
steps of the journey.

Where does an investigation into a topic such as sophistry or
statesmanship begin? At the start of the search for the sophist, the
Eleatic visitor remarks that he and Theaetetus may share merely the
name “sophist” in common but may mean quite different
things by the name. He aims to establish agreement about the kind to
which they ascribe the name (Sophist 218b–c), and he
wants to find a real definition—a definition that applies to all
and only members of the kind, and one that explains why any
instance is an instance of that kind: the inquirers seek the
essence of the target kind, the property or collection of
properties that make the kind what it is.

As a preliminary step in locating the essence of a kind, the
inquirers must figure out what people understand by the name of that
kind. This opening maneuver can occur in several ways: First, what
does the name connote, and what associations does it conjure up? The
word “sophist” is cognate with the word
sophos, which means “wise
man.”[1]
That connection suggests that the sophist has some sort of wisdom
(sophia) or expertise (technê)
(Sophist 221c–d). This idea enables the inquirers to locate
the sophist's ability and practice at the outset in the wide kind art
or expertise (technê). The word
“statesman” in Greek (politikos) is cognate with
the word “city” (polis), and so people associate
the statesman's activity with affairs of a city (Statesman
305e). In addition, the Stranger relates statesman and king (Statesman 258e)
and relies on the Homeric epithet of Agamemnon as shepherd of the
people (cf. Miller 2004, 40–43). The image of a herdsman quietly
guides the initial attempt to define the statesman, whom the Stranger
identifies in the opening division as herdsman of the human flock.

Second, what sorts of individuals does the name pick out, and what
features do those individuals share? Readers of the Socratic dialogues
will recall that when Socrates asks his “What is X?”
question (e.g., “What is piety?” “What is
courage?” “What is knowledge?”), the respondent
frequently opens with some sort of list. Euthyphro, when asked what
piety is, says: “I say that piety is doing what I'm doing right
now, prosecuting the wrongdoer, be it about murder or temple robbery
or anything else, whether the wrongdoer is your father or your mother
or anyone else” (Euthyphro 5d–e). Theaetetus,
when asked what knowledge is, first replies: “I think the things
someone might learn from Theodorus are knowledge—geometry and
the things you enumerated just now [arithmetic, astronomy,
music]—and cobbling, too, and the arts (technai) of the
other craftsmen; all of them together and each separately are simply
knowledge” (Theaetetus 146c–d). Socrates
regularly objects that the interlocutor has merely given him a list,
whereas he wants to know what all the items on the list have in common
and what makes them all instances of one kind. Although he complains
about the list, it helps to orient the investigation, because
reflection on the list equips the inquirers to see the common features
shared by all the items enumerated.

The Phaedrus calls this technique collection, and it
is used together with division (Phaedrus 265d–266b). A
collection can occur at the beginning of an investigation and at any
step of a division. By means of collection an inquirer brings together
a number of disparate things or kinds of things, often called by
different names, into one kind. The Statesman offers a good
example of a collection at the outset of its inquiry. The visitor
gathers together several kinds of things, called by different names,
into one kind—the target kind to be defined:

Shall we posit the statesman, the king, the slave-master,
and further the household manager, as one thing, although we call them
all these names, or should we say there are as many arts as the names
used? (Statesman 258e)

The visitor remarks that although we call these people by different
names, they all have in common a power to maintain their rule by the
strength of their understanding with little use of their hands and
bodies (Statesman 259c). This is a rough and ready description of the target
kind the inquirers hope to find at the terminus of their
division. This crude description enables them to pick out a wide kind
to divide (knowledge, epistêmê), and to take a
number of steps in the division. The Stranger first divides knowledge
into practical and theoretical and then seeks to locate the target kind at
the terminus stemming from theoretical knowledge.

At the beginning of the investigation into the sophist, the Stranger
says they need to practice their investigation on a paradigm
(paradeigma), before they embark on the difficult and
controversial topic before them.

In the Parmenides and elsewhere Plato speaks of separate,
immaterial forms as paradigms, and sensible
particulars as likenesses of them, which somehow fall short of the
original. This notion of a paradigm recurs in the Sophist, in
the Stranger's discussion of imitation (Sophist 235d–e), but
the Sophist and Statesman use another conception as
well. A paradigm involves a mundane example with a
feature—sometimes an essential feature—relevant to the
definition of the more difficult kind under investigation. In the
Sophist, an angler, defined as a sort of hunter, guides the
initial search for the sophist, who is also identified as a sort of
hunter.

A paradigm is not merely an example (or paradigmatic example) of some
general kind, as angling is an example of hunting and more generally
of expertise. The search for the definition of the example reveals a
procedure, which can be transferred to the harder case, independent of
content. Different paradigms introduce different procedures. The
angler introduces the method of dichotomous division, and the
definition of the angler recounts the steps on one side of that
division. Both the procedure and definitional structure are featured
in the harder case. The Statesman's main paradigm, weaving,
is offered much later in the investigation, after an initial attempt
to define the statesman by dichotomous division has led to an impasse.
Again, the example shares properties in common with the target
kind—both the weaver and the statesman engage in the art of
intertwining, among other things. The paradigm also introduces a
procedure that can be extended to the target. The Stranger calls the
new procedure division “by limbs” (Statesman
287c). By means of such division he gradually marks off the kind to be
defined (weaver or statesman) from other sorts of experts related to
it in various ways and operating in the same domain. Plato's paradigms
in the Sophist and Statesman typically reveal a
productive next move or series of moves in an investigation. A
paradigm indicates how to go on—how to take the opening steps in
an investigation or how to get beyond an impasse.

The divisions in the Sophist and Statesman are
divisions of arts (angling, sophistry, weaving, statecraft), and only
secondarily of experts who possess those arts. The art makes
the expert the sort of expert he is. The initial attempts to define
the sophist and statesman, using the method of dichotomous division,
each reveal a puzzle about the target kind, and that puzzle is then resolved in
some other way, or at least in conjunction with some other method.
The sophist is puzzling because his art turns up, not at a
single terminus like angling, but at many different termini.
Reflection on this peculiarity enables the inquirers to recognize
something they had previously missed—the essence of the
sophist—which ties together the various previous appearances.

The paradigm of the angler demonstrates the method of dichotomous
division and steers the first attempt to define the sophist. An
angler has a humble profession, familiar to everyone
(Sophist 218e): an angler hunts water creatures using a
special sort of hook. The visitor arrives at his definition by first
locating the angler's profession in a wide kind, art or expertise
(technê). He divides art into two subordinate kinds,
productive and acquisitive, then continues to divide the acquisitive
branch until he reaches the terminus, where he finds angling marked
off as what it is, apart from everything else. The sophist resembles
the angler in possessing expertise, but more intimately as well. He,
too, is a sort of hunter, but one who hunts terrestrial creatures
rather than aquatic. The Stranger first defines the sophist as a
hired hunter of rich young men (Sophist 223b; 231d).

So far angling seems well suited to direct the inquirers toward their
goal. Set on the right track, they readily complete the rest of the
division. But at the end of the first division, the Stranger remarks
that the sophist's art is really quite complicated (Sophist 223c). He then
turns his attention to a feature mentioned toward the end of that
division. The sophist earns wages from those he hunts, and he has a
product to sell. Returning to acquisitive art, the Stranger this time
ignores the branch that leads to hunting, and instead follows the
other branch, beginning from the art of acquisition by exchange, and
defines the sophist as someone engaged in commerce, who sells
products for the soul (Sophist 224c–d; 231d). In the pages following, the
Stranger focuses on various activities of the sophist and
defines him in five different ways. Each time the sophist turns up at
the tips of branches stemming from acquisitive art. Then on a sixth
round the Stranger makes a fresh initial division of art, marking off
the art of separation, and finds the sophist at the terminus of a
branch originating from there.

What should we make of the fact that the sophist turns up all over the
tree, and not at a single terminus like the angler? The angler differs
from the sophist in two main respects. First, the essence of the
angler is evident from his activity and is easy to spell out using
dichotomous division. As the Stranger says in the Statesman
(see above § 2), some things are easily pictured: we can perceive
the angler's essential activity, fishing by means of a special hook,
and readily depict it. The essence of the sophist, too, might seem
easy to picture from his activities. He engages in many observable
activities, so it seems appropriate to define him in a number of
ways. But the essence of the sophist, as we soon discover, is none of
those things. His essential activity cannot be pictured, as angling
can. Second, the nature of angling is uncontroversial, and the
Stranger and Theaetetus mean the same thing by the name
(Sophist 218e). By contrast, people have various conceptions
of what sophistry is, witnessed by the numerous divisions. They may
also disagree about what individuals fall under the kind. Because
sophistry is a disputed notion, people may have different conceptions
of it, and some conceptions may be simply mistaken.

The sophist is not unique in his tendency to turn up all over a tree.
Anything, including very simple things, can do the same, because
people experience them in different ways and so have different
conceptions of them. People tend to share the same concept of an
angler, because he engages in a single observable activity. But
anything of any complexity, engaged in several activities, is apt to
be conceived in different ways by different people. Some of those
conceptions may capture the entity by a feature or activity essential
to it, but many others will capture it in some accidental
way. Division does not itself guarantee that one attends to essential
features. Furthermore, a dispute might arise about virtually any
entity, but in many cases we can sort out disagreements by perception
or by some straightforward decision-procedure (we can settle disputes
about number by counting, disputes about size or weight by measuring
or weighing: Euthyphro 7b–c; cf. Phaedrus
263a–b). In other cases there is no ready way to decide.

The anomalous sixth division of the sophist (Sophist
226b–231b) reveals sophistry as a disputed concept. Whereas the
first five divisions locate the sophist somewhere under acquisitive
art, the sixth division locates him in a quite different place, under
the art of separation, marked off expressly from productive and
acquisitive art, as a third kind under technê, to deal
with this case. The sixth sophist purifies souls of beliefs that
interfere with learning, and he looks a lot like Socrates. The
Stranger queries using the label “sophist” in this case
and calls the art he has just uncovered the “noble” art of
sophistry. The sixth division exploits the fact that many people
mistook Socrates for a sophist (cf. Aristophanes' depiction of
Socrates in the Clouds and Socrates' defense against the
charge in Plato's Apology). This definition fails to capture
the sophist by even an accidental feature, but instead snares a
distinct kind called by the same name owing to a superficial
resemblance.

The sophist is special not because he turns up in so many places, or
because some conceptions pick out different kinds altogether that
merely share the same name. The sophist is unique because the
multiplicity in his case reflects not only something about us and our
experience, but also something about him and his art. The Stranger
restates the six definitions of the sophist (Sophist
231c–e), and then observes:

Do you know that, when someone appears to know many things, and is
called by the name of one art, this appearance (phantasma) is
not sound, but it is clear that the person experiencing it in relation
to some art is unable to see that [feature] of it toward which all
these sorts of learning look, and so he addresses the person having
them by many names rather than one? (Sophist 232a)

The Stranger has defined the sophist as a hired hunter of rich young
men, as engaged in selling his own and other people's wares for the
soul, as an expert in disputation about justice and injustice, and so
on. Why is the appearance not sound, and why does it indicate that we,
who experience that appearance, have failed to see that feature
“toward which all these sorts of learning look”? People
call all six conceptions by the name “sophist.” Why does
the Stranger say that those who experience this unhealthy appearance
call the entity by many names instead of one?

The Stranger will go on to point out that the sophist makes people
think he knows things he doesn't know (Sophist
232b–233c). The sophist's pretense would certainly explain the
unhealthiness of the appearance of manifold expertise, but the
preceding discussion and definitions leading up to the quoted passage
have not revealed the sophist's pretense. One must look ahead in the
dialogue to see that. Instead the unhealthy appearance seems to rest
on the very fact that the sophist, as so far defined, has so many
sorts of expertise—he knows how to hunt, how to make a profit,
how to sell his own intellectual wares, how to dispute about justice
and injustice, how to purify the soul of ignorance (cf. Notomi 1999,
80). Our judgment is unsound because we, who experience the sophist's
appearance of manifold expertise, fail to detect that feature of his
art “toward which all these sorts of learning
look”—something about the sophist that explains why he
seems to know so much, something about him that would justify our
calling him by one name: “sophist.”

What is that one thing still missing? As the discussion proceeds, the
Stranger argues that we are missing the feature of sophists that
explains how they can successfully appear wise to their
students, when they are not in fact wise (Sophist
233b–c). He and Theaetetus carefully defined the sophist in
terms of many of his activities but none of those makes him what he
is. They have so far missed the essence of the sophist, and for that
reason they mistakenly call him by many names instead of one.

The visitor introduces a new paradigm (Sophist 233d) to
unmask the special nature of the sophist's art: the art of
imitation. By means of imitation a painter can make products with the
same names as the originals and fool children into thinking he can
make anything he wants (Sophist 234b–c). The sophist
achieves the same result with statements (logoi), making
large things appear small, and easy things hard, and could fool young
people (Sophist 234c–235a). All the appearances are
linked together by the sophist's skill at imitating people who truly
know the things he seems to know.

With that insight, the Stranger declares that they have nearly caught
the sophist and sets out in pursuit (he finally completes this seventh
division at the end of the dialogue). This time ignoring the entire
branch of acquisitive art from which the first five divisions set out,
he instead takes the branch of productive art down to image-making and
divides it into two parts, copy-making (eikastikê) and
appearance-making (phantastikê). Whereas a copy-maker
preserves the proportions of the paradigm (paradeigma in its
more usual sense), and keeps the appropriate colors and other details,
an appearance-maker alters the true proportions of the original, so
that the image appears beautiful from a distance (Sophist
235c–236c). The visitor's proclaimed uncertainty about which
kind includes the sophist takes him into the dialogue's main project,
the investigation of not-being, an investigation needed to make sense
of appearances and false statement.

This appearing and seeming, but not being, and stating
things, but not true [things], all these were always full of difficulty
in the past and they still are. It is very difficult, Theaetetus, to
find terms in which to say that there really is false stating or
judging, and to utter this without being caught in a contradiction.
(Sophist 236e–237a)

In essence the sophist producesappearances, and
more precisely false appearances. So to understand the
sophist, the inquirers have to make sense of appearances and their
production. And to do that, the Stranger must take on Parmenides, who
famously said:

Never shall this be proved, that things-that-are-not are. When you inquire, keep
your thought from that route. (Sophist 237a; cf. Diels and Kranz
1951–52, 28B7.1–2)

To define the sophist as an expert in deception, as someone who
produces false appearances by means of statements, the Stranger needs
to show that Parmenides was wrong; he needs to demonstrate that it is
possible to say and to think that things-that-are-not are, and to do
so without contradiction. He starts with a series of puzzles about
not-being and then suggests that we may be in similar confusion about
being.

A false assumption about negation makes it seem impossible to think or
talk about not-being. The inquirers assume that a negation specifies
the opposite of the item negated (Sophist 240b,
240d). Think of opposites as polar incompatibles—a
pair of opposed terms that exclude each other. These include polar
contraries, such as black and white, or hot and cold, which have some
intermediate between them; and contradictories, such as odd and even,
large and not-large, or beautiful and not-beautiful, which do not (see
Keyt 1973, 300 n. 33). If not-being is the opposite of being, then
not-being is nothing at all, and we cannot think about that. A second
source of trouble about not-being infects being as well. The speakers
mistakenly assume that there is a one-to-one correspondence between a
name and a thing: a name picks out something, different names pick out
different things, and each thing has one proper name. The Stranger
later attributes the idea to some people he derisively calls
Late-Learners, who urge that we call a thing only by its own name and
not by any other. Thus they allow us to call a man “man”
and the good “good,” but they do not allow us to call a
man “good” (Sophist 251b–c) (for this
interpretation of the Late-Learners, see Moravcsik 1962, 57–59;
cf. Bostock 1984, 99–100, Roberts 1986, 230, and Malcolm 2006a,
278).

Given these assumptions, it seems impossible to talk about not-being
coherently (on the puzzles about not-being, cf. Owen 1971,
241–44). The first puzzle (Sophist 237b–e) shows
that we cannot meaningfully use the phrase “what-is-not,”
because the phrase attempts and fails to pick out nothing. The second
puzzle (Sophist 238a–c) shows that we cannot say
anything meaningful about what-is-not (i.e., about nothing), because
in using the words “what-is-not” we treat the referent as
one thing (by using the singular). The third puzzle (Sophist
238d–239c) shows that we contradict ourselves even trying to
state the puzzles. If not-being is the opposite of being (i.e.,
nothing), and if there is a one-to-one correspondence between a name
and a thing, then Parmenides was right: we cannot coherently think or
talk about not-being. The Stranger still finds these puzzles
persuasive at the end of the dialogue, because he says: “If a
statement is of nothing, it would not be a statement at all,
for we have shown that a statement that is a statement
(logos) of nothing cannot be a statement”
(Sophist 263c). In a final pair of puzzles (Sophist
239c–240c; 240c–241b), the Stranger shows that Parmenides
also provides the sophist a means to escape his pursuers
(Sophist 241a–c). The sophist does not say what-is-not
after all, because his images, while not the originals, are
something—images like the originals—and not nothing. The
speakers later recognize that they made a mistake in assuming that
not-being is the opposite of being (Sophist 257b, 258e), but
at this stage negation confounds them.

This entry skips over the puzzles about being, which aim to show that
we are in as much confusion about being as we are about not-being, a
situation that gives the Stranger hope: to the extent that he and
Theaetetus get clear about being or not-being, they will get clear
about the other as well (Sophist 250e–251a) (Owen 1971,
229–31, calls this claim the “Parity
Assumption.”)[2]

To show that we can call one thing by many names and that some names
specify a thing but misdescribe it, the Stranger introduces some
machinery. He proposes that some kinds can partake of, or
blend or associate with, other kinds (these terms
appear to be synonyms and to introduce an asymmetrical relation
between an entity and a property it has (pace Cornford 1935,
255–57; see Ackrill 1957, 212–18), whereas some kinds
cannot blend with each other (Sophist 251e–252e). Great
kinds enable the blending of kinds, much as vowels enable consonants
to fit together (252e–253a). Just as one needs expertise to know
how letters combine, so one needs expertise to know how forms
combine—an expertise the Stranger calls dialectic and
attributes to the philosopher (Sophist 253b–e). (For
different interpretations of the brief vexed passage on dialectic in
the Sophist, see Stenzel 1931 [1940], Gómez-Lobo 1977,
and M. L. Gill 2012, ch. 7.)

The Stranger announces that there are five great kinds
(Sophist 254b–c), and he will ask two questions about
them: (1) Of what sort are they? and (2) what capacity do they have to
associate with other things? (Sophist 254c). The five kinds
are change, rest, being, sameness and difference, and he will
eventually interpret not-being as difference (Sophist 257b,
258e–259a). He does not say that these five are the only great
kinds. There are probably others, including likeness and unlikeness,
oneness and multitude (cf. Parmenides 129d–e and
130b). The second part of the Parmenides investigates such
kinds, especially oneness and multitude, being and not-being, but also
sameness and difference, likeness and unlikeness, equality and
inequality, and others. The visitor presumably selects the five he
does in the Sophist, because for the present purpose he needs
a pair of opposites that exclude each other (change and rest,
described as “most opposite” [Sophist 250a],
serve as mutually exclusive consonant forms) and three vowel
forms—being, sameness, and difference—enabling kinds to
fit together or to be marked off from others.

The central section of the Sophist has been much discussed
and remains controversial. The distinction between consonant and vowel
forms concerns the way kinds relate to other kinds, but different
types of forms usually play these two roles. Consonant forms have
categorial content—that is, they can be organized into
genus-species trees, like entities in Aristotle's Categories
and like the kinds in the earlier divisions in the
Sophist. Vowel forms are empty of categorial content but have
structural content, and the greatest of the great kinds apply to
everything. Philosophers in the Middle Ages would call such kinds
transcendentals, since they transcend Aristotle's ten
categories (substance, quantity, quantity, and the other categories);
Gilbert Ryle called them syncategorematic. These entities are
not highly general kinds—viewed as such, they would be
categorial, since highest genera have (very general) categorial
content. In Ryle's words, the vowel forms “function not like the
bricks but like the arrangement of the bricks in a building”
(Ryle 1939 [1965], esp. 131, 143–44). They structure
other kinds and enable them to relate to one another. Let us call them
structural kinds (do not take the label to suggest that
categorial kinds lack structure, only that structural kinds are purely
structural and derive categorial content through their
applications).

Structural kinds apply to categorial individuals and kinds on the
basis of other, ultimately categorial properties those entities have.
For instance, two objects are equal or unequal if they have some
definite size or duration, or if they are numerable. Two objects are
like, if they have one or more properties in common. A red cube and a
red ball are like because they share redness in common. They are
unlike, because they have different shapes. The nature of a structural
kind is determined by its functional role in enabling categorial kinds
to be what they are and/or to associate with or differ from one
another.

The great kinds change and rest are problematic, because they are
sometimes treated as categorial kinds—for instance, in the
Parmenides change is divided into the species alteration and
locomotion, and locomotion is further divided into spinning in the
same place and moving from one place to another
(Parmenides138b–c, cf. Theaetetus
181c–d)—whereas sometimes they are listed along with other
structural kinds, e.g., Parmenides 129d–e,
136a–c. (For alternative interpretations of change and rest in
the Sophist, see Reeve 1985 and M. L. Gill 2012.) Whatever
Plato ultimately thinks about the status of change and rest, in the
second half of the Sophist his Stranger needs them to serve
as opposed, mutually exclusive, consonant kinds and uses them
repeatedly in his arguments marking off the five great kinds from one
another. So we should construe them there as consonant/categorial
kinds.

In the first part of this section (Sophist 254d–255e),
the Stranger addresses question (1): Of what sort is each of the great
kinds? He distinguishes each of the five kinds from one another,
starting with being, change, and rest. Change and rest, as opposites,
do not associate with each other; but being applies to both, since we
say that both of them are. Being must be a third kind distinct from
them, for if being, which applies to both opposites, were the same as
either of them—say change—then when being applies to rest,
by substitution rest would partake of its own opposite, which is
impossible (Sophist 254d, with 249e–250c). The Stranger
uses a similar argument to show that sameness and difference are
distinct from change and rest (Sophist
254d–255b). Furthermore, being is distinct from sameness. They
have to be different, because if they were not, when we say that
change and rest both are, we could substitute “are” with
“the same,” and change would be the same as rest
(Sophist 255b–c). (Much more can be said about
sameness: for discussion see, e.g., Lewis 1976, and de Vries
1988.)

Finally, the Stranger distinguishes difference from being. This
argument introduces a crucial distinction between two senses or uses
of “is” and deserves a separate subsection.

The Stranger uses an important distinction to
mark off difference from being:

But I suppose you agree that whereas some things are themselves by
themselves (auta kath' hauta), others are always said in
relation to other things (pros alla).—Of
course.—But isn't difference always in relation to something
different (pros heteron)?—Yes.—And this would not
be the case, if being and difference were not distinct. For if
difference partook of both forms [i.e., auto kath' hauto and
pros alla], as being does, then something even among the
different things could be different without being different in
relation to something different. But in fact it has turned out for us
that necessarily whatever is different is the very thing that it is
[i.e., different] from something different. (Sophist
255c–d)

So the nature of difference is a fifth kind (Sophist 255d–e).

Furthermore, we shall say that it pervades all of them, since each
one is different from the others not because of its own nature, but
because it partakes of the form of the different. (Sophist 255e)

Difference is distinct from being, because difference is always
relative to other things (pros alla), whereas being is both
itself by itself (auto kath' hauto) and relative to other
things (pros alla).

What is it for something to be itself by itself and/or
in relation to other things (for a detailed discussion of
this distinction, see Dancy 1999)? The traditional understanding of
the distinction relies on a passage from Diogenes Laertius (first
half of the 3rd century CE). Diogenes uses the expression
“in relation to something” (pros ti) in place of
“in relation to other things” (pros alla):

Of things that are, some are by themselves (kath' heauta),
whereas others are said in relation to something (pros ti).
Things said by themselves are ones that need nothing further in their
interpretation. These would be, for instance, man, horse and other
animals, since none of these gains through interpretation. All the
things said in relation to something need in addition some
interpretation, for instance, that which is greater than something and
that which is quicker than something and the more beautiful and such
things. For the greater is greater than something less and the quicker
is quicker than something. So of things-that-are some are said
themselves by themselves (auta kath' hauta), whereas others are
said in relation to something (pros ti). In this way,
according to Aristotle, he [Plato] used to divide the primary things.
(Diogenes Laertius 3.108–109)

Many scholars think that, in saying that being is said both itself by
itself (auto kath' hauto) and in relation to other things
(pros alla), Plato distinguishes different senses of the verb
“to be”—a complete or absolute sense
(“exists,” as in “The sea is”) and an
incomplete sense (the “is” of predication, as in
“the sea is blue” and/or the “is” of identity,
as in “the sea is the sea”) (Cornford 1935; Ackrill
1957). There is no separate verb “to exist” in classical
Greek; existence was expressed by means of the verb “to
be.”

If the Stranger characterizes being as having two (or more) senses, we
expect Plato to mention two (or more) forms of being, one for each
sense. Note that the Stranger introduces sameness as a distinct kind,
which should take care of the “is” of identity, so the
real issue is whether Plato distinguishes two other senses of the verb
“to be,” a complete existential sense and an incomplete
predicative sense. Michael Frede (1967, 1992) and G. E. L. Owen (1971)
argue that Plato does not mark off two senses of the verb “to
be,” but only different uses. There are significant differences
between these scholars' views, but their common ground, that Plato
uses “being” only as an incomplete predicate, has been
queried. Sentences in the Sophist, such as “Change is,
because it partakes of being” (Sophist 256a), are most
naturally construed as using “is” as a complete predicate
(existence).

But if Plato does use the verb “to be” as a complete
predicate, why does he not mention two forms, existence and a form
designated by the incomplete “is” of predication? Lesley
Brown (1986) has argued that there is no sharp semantic distinction
between the two syntactically distinct uses of the verb “to
be” in “x is F” and “x
is.” The “is” in “x is” is
complete but allows a further completion. If Brown is right, Plato
need not distinguish two senses of “is,” and claims in the
Sophist, such as “Change is, because it partakes of
being,” can also be accommodated. Change is (exists), because it
is something—it has a property that makes it the very thing that
it is: change.

Notice that on this view the complete use of “is” in
Greek does not correspond to existence in our modern sense: we say
that horses exist, whereas imaginary objects, such as Pegasus, do not.
On the proposed interpretation, anything describable is (exists). So
Pegasus is (exists), since we can describe him as a winged horse. On
the other hand, what-is-not is nothing at all—indescribable. It
was this notion of not-being—nothing—that was responsible
for the earlier puzzles about not-being in the Sophist. (For
criticisms of Brown's view, see Malcolm 2006b, and for criticisms of
Malcolm and Brown, see Leigh 2008.)

Supposing that being is a structural kind that functions in two ways,
let us consider its operation with categorial and other structural
kinds. Take some kind F-ness. F-ness is itself by itself
(auto kath' hauto), if being links F-ness to its own nature,
to what F-ness is by (or because of) itself. For instance, change is
changing by itself, largeness is large by itself, heat is hot by
itself, the one is one by itself. The associated statements are
self-predications of the sort Plato's characters mention in earlier
dialogues (“largeness is large,” “justice is
just;” for self-predications in the Sophist, see
258b–c). Scholars disagree about how to understand
self-predication in Plato. (For a view quite different from that
articulated here, see the entry on
Plato: middle period metaphysics and epistemology.)
In self-predications the item specified by the
subject-expression and the item specified by the predicate are
identical, but the relation between them is participation
(cf. Heinaman 1981). F-ness has its own nature by (or because of)
itself. One might say that the property F-ness exhausts what
F-ness is in its own right.

F-ness isin relation to other things, if being links F-ness
to something other than itself. For instance, change is
different from rest. Here being links change to difference, and
difference relates change to something other than change. Or change
is the same as itself: “When we say change is the same
as itself, we speak in this way because of its participation in
the same in relation to itself [pros
heautên])” (Sophist 256a–b). Being links change to sameness,
and sameness relates change to itself.

Notice that Plato speaks often of participation and blending but
mentions no distinct form of participation. He mentions no distinct
form, because being simply is the form that links a subject to a
property it has.

Difference always operates in relation to something different (pros
heteron) (Sophist 255d). Difference invariably relates the kind F-ness to
something different from F-ness.

Although difference as a structural kind always relates an entity
F-ness to something other than F-ness, difference can itself be a
subject-kind and be related to itself (via being itself by
itself). Difference is different by (or because of) itself
(Sophist 259a–b, with 255e and 258b–c). Being and
difference admit of self-predication like any other kind.

The second part of the treatment of great kinds takes up question (2):
What capacity do the five kinds have to associate with one another?
The Stranger carries out the analysis for one sample kind, change
(Sophist 255e–256d), and argues systematically that
change is non-identical with each of the other four kinds (change is
not rest, not the same, and so on), but partakes of three of the
four—all but rest (for comprehensive analysis of the section,
see Brown 2008). Thus it turns out that change both is and
is not each of the others (the Stranger even adds the
counterfactual: if change could partake of rest there would be nothing
strange about calling it resting [Sophist 256b]). The whole
analysis is implemented with two relations: non-identity (F-ness is
not G-ness, because F-ness partakes of difference from G-ness), and
positive predication (F-ness is G, because F-ness partakes of
G-ness). For example, change is not the same, because change partakes
of difference from the same, but change is the same, because change
partakes of sameness in relation to itself (Sophist
256a–b).

Scholars have noted that the Stranger's machinery, as so far
articulated, seems insufficient to address the upcoming problem of
false statement. The visitor has provided an analysis of identity
(via being and sameness), non-identity (via being and difference),
and positive predication (via being). What about negative
predication, needed for Plato's analysis of false statements,
such as “Theaetetus is flying”? Isn't this statement false,
precisely because the negative predication, “Theaetetus is not
flying,” is true? Can Plato also handle negative predication?

The Stranger made a serious mistake about negation in the puzzles
about not-being earlier in the dialogue (highlighted at
Sophist 240b, 240d), in supposing that the negation in
“not-being” indicates the opposite
(enantion) of being. The opposite of being is
nothing, and Parmenides is right that we cannot speak or
think about nothing: if we speak or think at all, we speak or think
about something. But Parmenides mistakenly thought that all
talk about not-being is attempted talk about nothing.

The Stranger solves the problem of not-being by recognizing two
things: (1) the negation operates on the predicate, not the
subject; (2) the negation need not specify the opposite of the item
whose name is negated but only something different from it.

Some scholars think that the Stranger extends his machinery to include
negative predication, as well as non-identity, at the end of the
section on great kinds. He appears to switch his focus from the
subject-kind to the attribute, since he speaks of being and not-being
“about“ the subject. He sums up his conclusions about
change and generalizes to other kinds saying: “And so
necessarily not-being applies to (epi) change and
to (kata) all the other kinds”
(Sophist 256d); and then: “So about
(peri) each of the forms the being is much and the not-being
is unlimited in multitude” (Sophist 256e). Some
scholars take the not-being applicable to change to include negative
features (e.g., not quick) as well as kinds it differs from (e.g.,
rest) (for interpretations of this sentence, see McDowell 1982 and
Frede 1992).

The Stranger calls attention to the mistake about negation and offers
a solution. Here too he focuses on the predicate:

When we say “not being” (mê on), as it
seems, we don't mean something opposite to being, but only
different.—How?—For instance, when we call
something “not large,” we don't indicate by the expression
the small any more than the equal.—Of course—So we won't
agree when someone says a negation signifies an opposite; we will
agree only to this much, that the “not” when prefixed to
the names following it reveals something different [from the
names], or rather from the things which the names uttered
after the negation designate. (Sophist 257b–c)

Apparently, when one says, “Simmias is not large,” one
indicates by the “not” merely something
different from large. Simmias could be equal or small in
comparison with someone else.

Now there is a pressing interpretive question. Does the statement
“Simmias is not large” assert that largeness is different
from every attribute Simmias has (manhood, bravery, red-hair,
blue-eyes, and so on)? (Keyt 1973 and Brown 2008 call this the
“Oxford interpretation.”) The discussion of “not
large” itself suggests otherwise. “Different from
large,” while not meaning the opposite of largeness (the polar
contrary smallness), means some size other than largeness
(smallness being one possibility among others). The negation
designates something within a wider kind, and the predicate negated
(say “large”) indicates that wider kind.

In characterizing the nature of difference, the Stranger compares it
to knowledge (Sophist 257c–d) (on this analogy, cf. Lee
1972). Knowledge is a categorial kind, and many species of knowledge
differ structurally from one another (cf. below § 7.2). Even so,
the comparison is instructive because some branches of knowledge, such
as applied mathematics, are distinguished from one another, not by
intrinsic differences in the structure of the expertise, but simply by
differences in the objects to which the same expertise applies (e.g.,
calculation in surveying and navigation). Like varieties of applied
mathematics, whose content derives from the domain to which the
knowledge applies, parts of difference acquire their content from the
item whose name is negated.

The visitor gives a second example of negation, and the example helps
to clarify his proposal. A part of difference called “the
not-beautiful” is set in opposition to the beautiful and differs
from the nature of the beautiful (Sophist 257d). He says:

Doesn't it turn out in this way that the not-beautiful, having
been marked off from (aphoristhen) some one kind
among beings, is also again in turn set in opposition
(antitethen) to some one of the things that are?
(Sophist 257e)

The Stranger mentions two kinds in addition to the not-beautiful,
since he marks off the not-beautiful from some one kind among beings,
and then sets it in opposition to the nature of the beautiful. The
not-beautiful is not just anything other than beautiful, but something
other than beautiful within a kind that covers both (call it
“the aesthetic”). On this view a part of difference gets
its categorial content in two ways from the item whose name is
negated. First, the part falls within a wider kind (such as size,
temperature, the aesthetic) determined by the positive attribute
F-ness, and that wider kind is divided into subkinds which exclude one
another and jointly exhaust the genus; and second, the part has an
attribute different from F-ness within that genus. All individuals
located under the genus occupy one and only one subkind. The subkinds
can form an incompatibility range—an ordered continuum
under a covering kind, such as degrees of coldness and heat under
temperature or degrees of smallness and largeness under size—but
they need not constitute an ordered series. They can instead
constitute an incompatibility set, such as circle, square,
triangle, and other species under shape; or man, ox, horse, and other
species under animal. The earlier mistake about negation was the
assumption that “the not-F” specifies the opposite of
F-ness. According to the new proposal “the not-F”
specifies the complement of F-ness under a wider
kind—that is, all the disjoint subkinds under the wider kind
other than F-ness. Any individual characterized as “not-F”
falls under the complement of F-ness and has some feature other than
F-ness within the wider kind. Thus, for example, when you say
“Simmias is not large,” you indicate that Simmias has some
definite size other than largeness, either the polar contrary
smallness or some intermediate size. (Brown, 2008, calls this
treatment of negation the “incompatibility range”
interpretation; see also Ferejohn 1989, Szaif 1996, and M. L. Gill,
2012, ch. 5.)

Making a statement (true or false) requires three steps (cf. Frede
1992, who mentions two steps): first, the speaker must pick out an
individual or kind to say something about, since a statement must be
about something to be a statement at all; second, he must pick out an
individual, kind, or feature to relate to the original entity; and
third, he asserts a relation between the two items—identity,
non-identity, attribution, or non-attribution. A statement consists
minimally of two parts, with one part (the grammatical subject)
referring to the entity the statement is about, and the other (the
predicate) asserting something about that entity. Only if the
predicate states something (that is or is not the case) about a
subject is there a complex—a statement—that can be true or
false (Sophist 262e–263d). The Stranger distinguishes
between names and verbs (Sophist
261d–262a), saying that a verb is a sign set over actions, and a
name a sign set over things that perform the actions. No statement
consists simply of a string of names or a string of verbs but must
must minimally fit a name together with a verb (Sophist
262a–c).

The main idea about statements is simple: a statement has
structure and its parts perform different functions. The name
(grammatical subject) refers to something, and if it fails to pick out
anything the statement does not come off (Sophist 262e). The
verb (predicate) ascribes to that thing an action (or property). If
someone asserts of a subject a predicate ascribing to it something
that is (the case) about it (an action the thing is actually
performing or an attribute it actually has), the statement is
true; whereas if he asserts of it a predicate ascribing
something that is not (the case) about it (something
different from what is the case about it), then the statement
is false (Sophist 263b). For instance, when the
Stranger says of Theaetetus, who is currently sitting,
“Theaetetus is sitting,” his statement is true because it
asserts something that is the case about Theaetetus; but when he says
of Theaetetus (still sitting), “Theaetetus is flying,” his
statement is false, because “flying” specifies something
different from what is the case about Theaetetus (namely,
sitting).

The statements the Stranger considers, “Man learns,”
“Theaetetus is sitting,” and “Theaetetus is
flying,” are all positive predications, the first two true, the
third false. But as noted above (§ 5.5), we need negative
predication to analyze the false statement, “Theaetetus is
flying.” Since the statement is false, the statement
“Theaetetus is not flying” is true.

Negative predication has received considerable attention in the
scholarly literature on the Sophist (for helpful accounts of
the various interpretations, and their advantages and disadvantages,
see Keyt 1973 and Crivelli 2012). Some scholars think that Plato needs
a second notion of negation in addition to difference (understood as
distinctness or non-identity), such as incompatibility, to accommodate
negative predication. On this view, flying is incompatible with one of
Theaetetus' properties (namely sitting). The incompatibility
interpretation requires Plato to change the meaning of
heteron from “different” to
“incompatible,” and there is no evidence in the text that
he does. The Oxford interpretation (mentioned above § 6.1) has
the advantage of keeping a single meaning for heteron but
calls for universal quantification over properties: to analyze the
statement “Theaetetus is not flying,” one must show that
flying is different from everything that Theaetetus is—a man,
snub-nosed, sitting, and so on. The Sophist does not provide
evidence of such an approach (see Wiggins 1971; Bostock 1984, 113;
White 1993, §§ 10, 11).

If Plato construes difference as a structural kind that operates in
the way we have discussed (the incompatibility range interpretation),
he can handle negative predication without introducing a second
meaning of heteron. We need not consider all of Theaetetus'
properties to explain the falsehood of “Theaetetus is
flying.” The analysis of negative predication is complex: the
item negated in “Simmias is not large” indicates a
division of the genus size, and the negation designates something
different (non-identical, distinct) from largeness within that
genus. In the case of Theaetetus' imagined flight, we must simply find
that activity different from flying within the relevant
incompatibility set, a set apparently consisting of our pair of
consonant forms: change/rest. Since Theaetetus is currently sitting (a
species of rest), his current rest excludes flying (a species of
change). One can explain his not flying by appeal to his sitting.

Like the Sophist, the opening division in the
Statesman locates a problem with its target kind. Whereas
the sophist turned up all over the tree, the statesman turns up at a
single terminus, but he is not alone, since many rivals have a claim
to be there too. Just as the puzzle about the sophist revealed by the
opening divisions indicated something significant about the essence
of a sophist, so the competition at a single terminus indicates
something significant about the essence of a statesman.

The Statesman embarks on its division without a new paradigm.
Apparently the angler from the previous dialogue serves as a viable
guide for the method of dichotomous division itself. As we noted in
§ 3.1, the Statesman opens its investigation with a
collection of kinds (king, statesman, household manager, slave-owner)
that make up the target kind, and this collection allows a crude
description of the kind to be defined, which guides the inquiry. Since
instances of the target kind can direct and control other people by
means of their understanding without physical manipulation, the
Stranger starts his division from the wide kind knowledge and
immediately divides it into practical and theoretical, and then looks
for the statesman down the branch originating from theoretical
knowledge. The opening division takes place in two stages—a
first stage focusing on the statesman's knowledge, followed by a
lecture on method, and a second stage focusing on the object of that
knowledge. Both phases of the division are peculiar but in different
ways.

Consider stage one. Having set off down the theoretical branch of
knowledge in search for the statesman, the Stranger divides
theoretical knowledge into two sub-kinds. One kind recognizes
difference, judges things recognized and then leaves off (the art of
calculation is here); the other kind recognizes difference and judges
things recognized, and then directs on the basis of that judgment
(statecraft is here) (Statesman 259d–260c). Directing
suggests practical, if not hands-on, knowledge, so keep in mind that
practical knowledge was marked off from practical knowledge and
abandoned at the start. Next he divides directive knowledge into two
sorts, of which one passes on the directions of others (heralds are
here), while the other passes on its own directions for the sake of
generation (the statesman is here) (Statesman
260c–261b). Knowledge for the sake of generation/production
again suggests practical expertise, and the statesman's knowledge
looks ever more practical as the division continues. At the next
division one kind passes on its own directions to generate inanimate
things (the master-builder belongs here), while the other does so to
generate animate things (the statesman belongs here)
(Statesman 261b–d). The Stranger then divides this
latter kind into those who generate and rear single animate things
(ox-drivers and grooms are here), and those who generate and rear them
in herds (the statesman and herdsman are here) (Statesman
261d). Once the statesman merges with the herdsman, the theoretical
branch has become thoroughly mixed up with the practical branch
originally discarded, since the knowledge of horse-breeders, cowherds,
shepherds, and swineherds is practical and scarcely theoretical. No
wonder the statesman will prove to have company at the terminus:
farmers, millers, physical trainers, doctors, and other experts also
take care of practical aspects of human life (Statesman
267e–268a).

At the end of the first stage of the division, when the inquirers have
reached herd-rearing, the Stranger invites Young Socrates to make the
next division himself. By now the boy sees where the division is
heading and proposes to mark off the rearing of humans (statecraft)
from the rearing of other animals (ordinary herding)
(Statesman 262a). The Stranger stops him, objecting that such
a division is like dividing the human race into Greek and barbarian:
barbarian is not a proper kind because its members share only a
negative feature, being non-Greek speakers. The mistake is like
marking off all numbers other than 10,000 (Statesman
262c–263a). The Stranger advises Young Socrates to divide
through the middle of things and not break off one small part from a
large part without a form (e.g., he should divide number into even and
odd, and human into male and female [Statesman
262e]). Someone hoping to encounter forms should, he says, make
divisions into parts that also have a form (Statesman
262a–c).

Although the Stranger admits that he is wandering from the topic and
should put off discussion of method until another occasion, he tarries
a little longer to give a lecture on the difference between mere parts
of a kind and parts that are themselves genuine kinds
(Statesman 263b). Apparently, real kinds include only members
with some positive feature in common, while other parts allow members
sharing only a negative feature. Scholars have taken the Stranger's
lecture very seriously as indicating Plato's views about proper
procedure and the metaphysics on which division relies, and they
appeal especially to Plato’s Phaedrus, where the elder
Socrates announces that someone engaging in correct procedure should
divide kinds at their natural joints, not hack off bits like a bad
butcher (Phaedrus 265e) (see Moravcsik 1973, Cohen 1973, and
Wedin 1987). Before we assess Young Socrates' mistake and the
Stranger's lecture, we ought to consider the second stage of the
division, since it purports to demonstrate correct procedure.

First the visitor retraces his steps and points out that in speaking
of rearing animate things, he and Young Socrates had already in effect
divided living creatures into wild and tame (Statesman
264a). All rearing deals with tame animals, and some of that rearing
devotes itself to tame animals in herds. He then divides herd-rearing
into aquatic and terrestrial (the branch he pursues), next marks off
the winged from the footed (the branch he pursues), then the horned
(oxen, sheep) from the hornless (the branch he pursues), then the
interbreeding (horses, donkeys) from the non-interbreeding (the branch
he pursues), and finally the four-footed (just pigs are left) from the
two-footed (humans). He now defines statecraft as rearing the
two-footed, non-interbreeding, hornless, terrestrial, tame herd:
humans (Statesman 267a–c).

This division has given Platonic division a bad name, and there is
much to query (see Dorter 1994: 181–91), but perhaps the most
obviously dubious move comes at the end: according to the division,
the swineherd has more in common with the statesman than with the
cowherd and shepherd. Later in the dialogue the visitor says that the
statesman differs from all other herdsman (including the swineherd) in
a crucial respect. No one disputes with the cowherd his claim to look
after all aspects of the life of his herd—he rears them; he is
their doctor, their match-maker, their breeder and trainer—and
the same is true of all other herdsmen, with one exception: the
herdsman of humans, the statesman. In his case alone many rivals
compete for the title of caretaker—farmers produce their food,
doctors cure their diseases, physical trainers guide their exercise,
and other experts attend to other human needs (Statesman
267e–268d). Given this difference, would it not have been better
to distinguish humans from other herded animals at the outset, as
Young Socrates proposed?

Young Socrates’ division into the herding of humans and the herding of
other animals seems in retrospect to have considerable merit and
indeed to apply two lessons from earlier in the day (cf. § 6.1
above). First, the Stranger said in the Sophist that parts of
knowledge derive their names from the objects they are set over
(Sophist 257c–d), and that claim justifies identifying
statecraft—a mode of herding—as human herding. Second, a
negation specifies the complement of a form within a wider kind, and
that thesis justifies distinguishing herded animals into humans and
other animals. In the Sophist, kinds designated by negations,
such as the not-large and the not-beautiful, have their own
distinctive feature (not-large, not-beautiful), and one might construe
them as forms, though the Stranger does not explicitly identify them
as such (Sophist 257e–258c). Evidence from the
Sophist thus encourages a division of animals herded into
humans and other animals, especially since the negative kind has a
positive name: “beast.”

Young Socrates has in fact made an error, but the nature of his error
becomes evident only later in the dialogue. In his zeal to reach the
destination he makes two related mistakes, one about the
objects of human herding, and the other about the associated
art. The Stranger exploits the first mistake in the second
stage of the division by relying on the boy's assumption that herding
is a single undifferentiated activity with branches marked off by the
physical traits of the animals herded. But is statecraft concerned
with humans as biological specimens? Human biology studies our
physical traits, but the upcoming Myth in the Statesman
reveals that the aspect of humans salient to statecraft is our way of
life, our culture and expertise (Statesman
274b–d).[3]
Young Socrates seems to view the objects of statecraft from the wrong
perspective. Second, in focusing on the objects of
statecraft, he ignores the art itself and fails to notice that many
arts—farming, medicine, physical training, as well as
statecraft—look after the needs of human beings
(Statesman 267e–268a). As caretaker of humans, the
statesman has lots of competition. The manner of the
statesman's care, rooted in the structure of his expertise,
distinguishes statecraft from other arts that look human beings
(Statesman 274e–275a; cf. Lane 1998, 44).

What should we make of the Stranger’s lecture on parts and kinds,
given that it overlooks the real faults in Young Socrates’ proposal
and that the second stage of the division yields such odd results? The
Stranger probably suspects the nature of the boy's confusion and
adopts an approach to help him see his mistake. His lecture assumes
the boy’s point of view (that statecraft differs from other modes of
herding because of the physical traits of the animals herded), advises
him to divide kinds into sub-kinds with roughly equal extension, and
then demonstrates in hilarious detail the results of that
assumption. According to this interpretation, we should not take the
Stranger’s lecture to reveal Plato’s views on metaphysics and
method. In the lecture itself the visitor appears to warn Young
Socrates and the audience to beware of his advice (Statesman
263b: “But be absolutely on your guard against ever thinking
that you have heard this [i.e., the difference between kind and part]
clearly distinguished by me”).

Our suspicions should increase when we reflect on the Stranger’s
practice in the dichotomous divisions in the Sophist and
earlier in the Statesman. At the beginning of the
Statesman the visitor declares that his search for the
statesman will start from the same genus used in the search for the
sophist, but he will cut it in a different place (Statesman
258b–c). No one remarks on the fact that in the Sophist
the visitor divided the genus art or expertise
(technê), whereas now he calls the genus
“knowledge” (epistêmê); he blurs the
difference further by using the terms technê and
epistêmê interchangeably in the
Statesman. In the Sophist he cut the genus at step
one into productive and acquisitive (later he added separative), and
this time cuts it at step one into practical and theoretical. Recall
that in the Phaedrus the elder Socrates advises his
interlocutor to divide kinds at the natural joints: dividing at the
natural joints mattered in that dialogue, because Socrates was
classifying kinds in order to sort out an ambiguity between two senses
of the word “love” (eros), a vulgar love on the
left and a heavenly love on the right (Phaedrus
265e–266b). The Sophist and Statesman use
dichotomous division for a different purpose and consequently ignore
parts on the left once marked off: the Stranger aims to define a
single kind at the bottom of the right-hand branch of a
tree. The target (however vague or even misguided the initial
conception of it) determines what genus to divide at the start, then a
useful first cut and relevant next steps. Different targets (the
angler, the sophist, the noble sophist, the statesman) prompt the
investigators to carve up kinds in different ways (cf. Ackrill 1970,
384; Cavini 1995, 131; Lane 1998, 34–38), and what counts as an
appropriate cut depends on the target of the investigation. We should
not expect genuine kinds at intermediate steps on either the left- or
right-hand side of the division.

The Stranger’s lecture on parts and kinds and the second stage of the
dichotomous division contribute to the overall impression that the
Statesman is a philosophical exercise designed to train
students to recognize, diagnose, and correct mistakes. The dialogue is
full of trial and error, with many mistakes noticed and corrected
along the way, while others go unremarked. This strategy provokes the
interlocutor and audience to see for themselves what has gone wrong
and why. In this way they learn the methods of Platonic dialectic.

Earlier we observed (§ 4.2) that the problems of definition to
which the Sophist calls attention, though not unique to the
sophist, are in his case partially explained by his essence. The same
is true of the statesman. Why does the statesman have so many rivals?
That is the puzzle of the statesman. Reflection on the shortcomings of
the first division and the Myth eventually suggests a way
forward. What is the special manner of the statesman's care
as opposed to theirs? We have noticed that the inquirers tangle the
threads of theoretical and practical knowledge. This difficulty
arises, because statecraft, as we finally learn, involves both
theoretical and practical knowledge (cf. Statesman 284c,
289c–d, 305c–d, 311b–c). Because of the nature of
his expertise, the statesman is intimately connected with everyone
engaged in the care of humans; he oversees and directs their
activities and uses their products and services in his own
higher-order activity. Perhaps the statesman somehow combines
theoretical and practical knowledge in managing the interactions of
the members of his flock. Indeed, perhaps his essence is or includes
the art of combining, like weaving (Statesman
279a–b). The last part of the dialogue recognizes this
connection and takes weaving as its paradigm.

The Stranger quickly presents a dichotomous division that yields the
art of weaving and defines it as the art in charge of clothes
(Statesman 279c–280a). Like the definition of the
statesman reached in the first part of the dialogue, this definition,
for all its detail, is too general, since many arts compete for the
same title: carding, spinning, spindle-making, mending,
clothes-cleaning, and others. The dichotomous division fails to
isolate the mode of clothes-working peculiar to weaving.

The paradigm of weaving serves two main functions (on the paradigm of
weaving, cf. El Murr 2002 and Blondell 2005). First, it introduces a
new procedure allowing the inquirers to differentiate the target from
other arts akin to it, all located in the lowest kind reached by the
previous dichotomous division. As earlier noted (§ 3.2), the new
procedure is division “by limbs, like a sacrificial
animal” (Statesman 287c) (for a different view of the
Stranger's strategy, see El Murr 2005). Whereas dichotomous division
separates a kind into two parts, and then ignores at each step the
part that does not lead to the goal, division by limbs breaks off
pieces of an original whole, whose members are interrelated and
cooperate in tending their common object. All the arts of
clothes-working have clothes as their object. Many of the kindred arts
provide weaving with its tools or materials (these contributing arts
are characterized as sunaitiai, “helping
causes”). The differentiation of weaving from various subsidiary
arts reveals a procedure to define statecraft in relation to the
subordinate arts.

Second, weaving exemplifies an essential feature shared with the
target: both weaving and statecraft engage in intertwining. The
statesman weaves in a number of ways, and in particular weaves
together into one fabric the virtues of courage and moderation, often
at odds in a city. The statesman and the weaver have many other
features in common. Both are experts in measurement, measuring the
more and the less not merely in relation to each other but more
importantly in relation to some practical goal they aim to achieve
(Statesman 284a–e) (on the arts of of measurement, see
Lane 1998, Delcomminette 2005, Lafrance 2005, and Sayre
2006). Furthermore, the arts of both experts control the subsidiary
arts, whose products they use in their own activity
(Statesman 308d–e). The statesman directs the experts
who are, as it were, the practical arms of his expertise and
especially those identified as his closest kin: the orator, the
general, the judge, and the teacher. The statesman, an expert in
timing (see Lane 1998), determines when the general should go to war,
though he leaves it to the general to work out military strategy and
carry it out. He determines the good that rhetoric will serve but
leaves the techniques and practice of persuasion to the
rhetorician. He decides what is just and lawful but leaves it to the
judges to implement his decisions (Statesman
303e–305d). The statesman must further determine what mix of
courage and moderation will most advance the good in the city, but he
calls on the teachers to instill in the youth the right belief about
what is good (Statesman 308e–310a). The visitor tells
us that the statesman cares for every aspect of things in the city,
weaving them together in the most correct way
(Statesman 305e).

In the first part of the Parmenides, the youthful Socrates
sets out a theory of forms reminiscent of forms in the Phaedo
and the Republic, and the main speaker, Parmenides, puts his
theory to the test by focusing on two chief questions: What forms are
there? and what is the nature of the relation between physical objects
and forms—the relation known as participation? At the end of the
interrogation in Part I, when Socrates has failed to rescue his
theory, and we might think that Plato should simply junk it,
Parmenides comes to its defense, saying that if someone with an eye on
all the difficulties denies that there are stable forms, he will have
nowhere to turn his thought and will destroy the power of dialectic
entirely (Parmenides 135b–c). Scholars look to the
Sophist and Statesman and other late dialogues in
the hope of finding Plato's answer to the problems posed in the
Parmenides. Does Plato continue to treat forms as he did in
the Phaedo and Republic, despite the objections? Are
the objections answerable and was Socrates simply too inexperienced to
answer them adequately? Do the late dialogues record Plato's on-going
perplexity? Or do they seriously modify Plato's earlier positions?

Our investigation of the Sophist and Statesman
prompts two observations. First, these two dialogues are engaged in
dialectic from beginning to end, and the Statesman explicitly
claims that the exercise aims to make us better dialecticians
(Statesman 285d, 286d–287a). So Plato clearly thinks
that dialectic remains possible, and his Stranger seems actively
engaged in helping his young interlocutors practice and learn the
techniques. Many scholars think that the method of dichotomous
division is the method of dialectic in Plato’s late
dialogues. Certainly this method serves a valuable heuristic purpose,
often revealing what makes a particular concept (e.g., sophist,
statesman) puzzling, but once the puzzle has come to light, the main
speaker reorients the discussion and introduces new tools and
techniques (e.g., five great kinds, division by limbs). Platonic
dialectic employs numerous and varied techniques adjusted to the
special topic being explored.

Second, the Sophist and Statesman say a lot about
forms, and yet the forms discussed in these dialogues seem different
in some key respects from those discussed in the Phaedo and
first part of the Parmenides. Both the Sophist and
Statesman search for the essence of their target kinds, the
stable feature or collection of features that makes its possessor what
it is. Each dialogue succeeds in revealing the essence of the kinds
investigated. Are the sophist, the statesman, the angler, the weaver,
and their arts separate forms of the sort discussed in the first part
of the Parmenides? Strange if they were, since the arts are
human inventions. The visitor does say (as noted in § 2 above)
that “immaterial things, being finest and greatest, are revealed
clearly only by means of a verbal account (logos) and by
nothing else,” and that “all things now said are for the
sake of those” (Statesman 285e–286b). The sophist
and the statesman rank among great and difficult things
(Sophist 218c–d, Statesman 278e;
cf. 279a–b), and their arts are immaterial, though immanent in
their possessors. So the visitor's statement need not refer to
separate forms. Still, the Timaeus (widely regarded as a late
dialogue) speaks of separate immaterial forms, and such forms would be
included in the Stranger's statement. Whatever one makes of the
treatment of forms in the Timaeus, separate forms are absent
from the Sophist and Statesman, with one notable
exception: at Sophist 245e–249d (the Battle of Gods and
Giants), the Stranger tries to reconcile two extreme positions about
being, one of which features separate immaterial forms.

What should we think about forms of negations, such as the not-large
and the not-beautiful? Aristotle criticized Plato for commitment to
such forms (Metaphysics A.9, 990b), but notoriously Aristotle
was not always fair in his criticisms. The Sophist explicitly
speaks of the form of not-being (Sophist 258d: to
eidos…tou mê ontos), and a number of scholars regard the
not-large and the not-beautiful as forms (e.g., Moravcsik 1962, Frede
1967, 92–94, Szaif 1996, 439–45, Crivelli 2012,
204–14). The Stranger’s lecture on parts and kinds in the
Statesman, rejecting forms of barbarian and numbers other
than 10,000, poses a well-known problem for that view, yet as we saw
(§ 7.1 above) the lecture and second stage of the dichotomous
division are themselves puzzling. Not only that: the Stranger warns
Young Socrates not to think he has heard anything clear from him about
the difference between a kind and a part (Statesman
263b). This warning could strengthen the hand of those who attribute
to Plato a commitment to forms of negations. One question we should be
asking, though: what function(s) do Platonic forms perform? Does Plato
need a form whenever people call several things by the same name (as
stated perhaps at Republic 10.596a)? Or does he invoke only
those forms needed to explain the features of things? In the latter
case, perhaps he can do without a form of the not-large, because he
can explain that feature by appeal to the form of largeness and the
form of not-being. Perhaps he needs no form of mud/clay (rejected by
Socrates as a separate form at Parmenides 130c–e),
since he can explain the mixture by appeal to forms of its
ingredients, earth and water, and the ratio of their combination
(Parmenides 130c, with Theaetetus
147a–c). Questions about the scope of forms in Plato remain far
from settled.

In addition to categorial kinds such as the sophist and statesman, there
are also the great kinds discussed in the
Sophist—change, rest, being, sameness, and difference.
These kinds were embraced in the Parmenides (esp.
Parmenides 130b), but they seem markedly
different from ordinary kinds like the sophist and statesman. The
vowel forms—being, sameness, and difference—appear to
structure other kinds, enabling them to be what they are and to
relate to one another. Dialectic aims to discover and articulate
those structures. Structural kinds are closely tied to dialectic, as
Parmenides foretold, but both forms and dialectic seem to have
developed apace since the Phaedo and the Republic.

The SEP would like to congratulate the National Endowment for the Humanities on its 50th anniversary and express our indebtedness for the five generous grants it awarded our project from 1997 to 2007.
Readers who have benefited from the SEP are encouraged to examine the NEH’s anniversary page and, if inspired to do so, send a testimonial to neh50@neh.gov.